


Halfway Back

by Sholio



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Friendship, Gen, Team Bonding, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26166679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Team Torchwood run a sanctuary for magical creatures, and this time they've got a basilisk on their hands.
Relationships: Gwen Cooper & Jack Harkness & Owen Harper & Ianto Jones & Toshiko Sato
Comments: 15
Kudos: 43
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	Halfway Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



"Come here, that's it, you little beauty, c'mon darlin', you know you want in the — oh no you don't, sod it, you bleedin' little —"

With smoking blood leaking from a dozen wounds, and caustic poison saliva dribbling from its jaws, the basilisk crawled out of the ruins of Owen's net trap. It crouched low, hissing at him, and Owen tensed and moved a hand toward the two weapons, stun gun and actual gun, weighing down his belt. 

He'd caught up with it at the edge of an overgrown hedge next to what had once been a car park but now was a cracked wasteland of broken tarmac with weeds and wildflowers reclaiming it. Through the sprawling, flowered profusion of the hedge, the side of an abandoned building could be glimpsed, square and drab; perhaps once a school or a small block of businesses.

Owen still wasn't fond of venturing into the sanctuary proper, away from the comparatively tame areas around the Hub. It was _wild_ back here, a dense jungle of trees and abandoned buildings draped in moss and vines that belonged a thousand miles south of Cardiff. There were plants that would bite you, and ones that felt like they were watching you, and some that resembled nothing that had ever grown in nature.

The drooping bits of hedge charred where they touched the basilisk's leaking fluids. It crouched lower, hissing at Owen. It was only about ten yards away, _much_ too close for a creature whose bodily fluids were poison, that could kill you with a look. Even though the smoked glasses, looking at it was giving him a killer headache.

Still, he crept a step closer. If the traps didn't work, maybe he could get close enough to stab it with a tranquilizer ...

It broke and bolted, charging deeper into the undergrowth. 

Owen cursed loudly and inventively, and reached for his radio.

"Tosh? Ianto? You around?"

"Will Gwen do?" said Gwen's voice over the radio, light and cheerful, as well she might be since she was back in the pleasant, indoors, non-basilisk-infested peace of the Hub, sod her anyway.

"Sorry love, what I really need is one of the weirdos."

"Oi!" said Gwen, and at the same time there was an equally indignant "Oi!" from Ianto, apparently listening in, who then added, "No need to be rude."

"I haven't been polite a day in my life and I don't plan to start now." Owen cautiously approached the bushes and prodded at the smoldering remains of the net with the toe of his shoe. So much for that idea.

"Normal humans aren't good enough for you now?" Gwen asked, a laugh in her voice.

"Good enough for most purposes," Owen said, "but what I really need is someone immune to basilisks."

"You lost the basilisk," Ianto said.

"I did not _lose_ it." He peered at the trail of blackened foliage it had left in the shrubbery. At least it wouldn't be hard to follow. "I just temporarily misplaced it."

"Owen!" said Tosh's voice over the radio. "Is this the one Jack caught down by the harbor? Are you hunting an injured basilisk by yourself? Let me and Ianto handle it. You're a human; it could _kill_ you."

"I'm well aware of that; that's why I'm radioing for backup."

"Anything we should bring?" Ianto asked briskly. There was rustling; sounded like he was swinging into action already. Truth be told, as nice as it would be to have Tosh by his side on this, Ianto was the one who'd be the most useful — probably the only one of them who could bring the basilisk in without too much chance of being seriously hurt himself.

"One of the tranq guns would be a good idea. I don't know if any of our sedatives will work on it, but nets and ropes don't; it melts right through 'em. Bring the ketamine darts; those might do something."

"I'll leave a note for Jack," Gwen said. 

"Wait, what? This wasn't an invitation to a team basilisk-hunting party!"

But that was exactly what he got, when a red dragon thumped down in the middle of the car park a few minutes later. Gwen was riding on its back, with an equipment pack slung over her shoulder, holding on for dear life with one hand and, with the other, tucking a small brownish-red fox up against her chest. Its three tails fluttered in different directions as if they had lives of their own.

The fox leaped gracefully down and blurred in midair so that it was Tosh who landed lightly on the ground. Gwen slid off the dragon's back after her.

"I don't recall inviting the entire bloody lot of you," Owen said, folding his arms. At least Gwen was wearing sunglasses, although his throbbing head was a reminder of just how potent the basilisk's stare was even through the dark glass. "I _specifically_ requested basilisk-immune backup."

"Well, you've got it," Ianto said. He started speaking as a dragon and shifted mid-sentence, melting down to his regular human shape, three-piece suit and all; his voice started out deep and went up a register or two, losing some draconic overtones as he shifted human again.

"Great, fine, whatever, we'll throw you at it while the rest of us run. Who's got my tranq gun?"

"I do," Gwen said, "and I'm holding onto it, because I'm a better shot than you are, and you well know it."

"This bloody day," Owen muttered.

Tosh lightly pressed a small packet into his palm. "I brought you some paracetamol," she said quietly. "I know just being near basilisks is painful for humans."

At least some of his irritation evaporated; he was unexpectedly touched. "Thanks, Tosh." He tore open the packet, and added to the others, "See, this is how you get on my good side."

"I'm sorry, I didn't know you had a good side," Ianto said. He spoke absently; he was looking around, scenting the air.

"Basilisk?" Gwen said.

"No." Ianto stepped back toward the others, subtly interposing his body between them and the trees — bloody show-off. "Something else. It smells wrong."

Gwen slung the tranq gun off her shoulder, and Tosh reached for the stun-gun that was the only weapon she ever carried, but Owen (after a moment of spiking adrenaline) had begun to relax. He'd glimpsed flickers of a pale hide while he was following the basilisk. He knew what was trailing him through the woods, and he wasn't too worried about it — or, well, at least he was used to it.

"No worries," he said quietly, and reached out to push the muzzle of Gwen's tranq rifle down. "It's not going to hurt us. And that won't do anything anyway."

"What is —" Gwen began, and then they all broke off when the bushes rustled and something emerged, taking a hitching step forward.

It had once been a unicorn. Now the once-white hide draped loosely over its projecting skeleton, collapsing in places to reveal glimpses of dead, dark flesh and pale bone within. Even its horn was tarnished somehow, not the gleaming mother-of-pearl of a living unicorn, but something dull and dead, with no luster to it. The worst part was the uncanny life still burning in its sunken eyes.

"Oh," Tosh said, a tiny sound of dismay and even pain. She took a step backward. Kitsune were creatures of light and life. This creature might hurt her as much as the basilisk's stare had hurt Owen. He found himself moving forward, putting her behind him.

"Is that one of Suzie's experiments?" Gwen asked quietly.

"Guess so," Owen said. "She's been following me." He took a careful step forward. "Hello, sweetheart," he said, the gentleness conjured up without his conscious direction, born from a deep well of pity and anger. The unicorn flicked its decayed ears as if listening to him.

"Don't," Ianto said sharply, holding a hand out to stop him. Owen impatiently shoved his hand aside.

"She won't hurt me. None of 'em hurt anyone, do they? They're just like that."

Suzie had been the Torchwood Three veterinarian before Owen's medical degree was pressed into use for that purpose. As it turned out, she'd been doing a lot more than doctoring the creatures at the sanctuary. She was dead now, dead for real, but her creations were still out there — uncanny experiments left over from her explorations of the boundaries between life and death.

Most of them kept to themselves, out there in the wild parts of the sanctuary. There was no telling how many there were, or for that matter, how long their unnatural life had survived Suzie's death. Every so often the team found decayed animals in the woods, maybe natural deaths, maybe leftovers from Suzie's tenure — collapsing where they fell, bereft of the energy that had once animated them.

Compared to some of the ones Owen had seen, the zombie unicorn was relatively intact. It didn't stink — Suzie's creations rarely did, but some of those in the end stages started to. He'd seen more of those than he wanted to, because when they were dying, sometimes they managed to drag themselves back to the Hub, as if some part of them still remembered that help and surcease of their pain could be found there.

Except there was nothing he could do for any of them.

But she'd come all this way. There might be something he could do for her; maybe painkillers, maybe euthanasia, if he could come up with something that would work on the undead. "Hey there, darlin'. I know it hurts. Bloody awful shithole of an unfair world, ain't it?"

He thought she might run away, but she stood still. She didn't breathe exactly, but her flank shuddered as if she was trying to.

Owen edged up next to her. There was a smell from her, not unpleasant, a sort of mossy, forest smell. She turned her head, following him with her dead eyes.

"Owen ..." Ianto said. Glancing up, Owen saw that the team were hanging a few yards back, with Ianto having interposed himself between the other, less dragon-durable teammates and the unicorn. Tosh looked wildly anxious.

"It's all right," he said, keeping his voice pitched low. That horn was sharp-looking. Dead or not, she could still hurt him, if she chose to. But she held still, her decayed skin quivering as if at the touch of a fly.

Two years ago, he was fresh out of his residency, a young A&E doctor whose patients were mainly uni-age rugby players with ears bitten off in bar brawls and young prats whose idea of a wild sex night was shoving unwise items up their arses. He'd never been renowned for his bedside manner. But he'd had a crash course, since then, in calming hurt, frightened wild things, if only to stop them biting him. This wasn't how he'd ever seen himself using his medical degree, that was for sure.

He pulled out his medical kit, letting the unicorn watch him, and loaded up a syringe with the heaviest-duty painkiller he had. Probably wouldn't do anything; he doubted there was any blood flow in her dead body to move it around. But hell, it was the only thing he had to try.

"Gonna touch you now, darlin'. Don't go stabbing me with that great bloody shiv of yours, yeah?"

Normal unicorns, at least according to Jack, could heal with their horns. He wondered what the touch of a dead unicorn's horn would do. Probably nothing good, even if it didn't stab you in a vital place.

But she stood still when he placed his hand on her shoulder. Her fur was rough, not sleek like a living animal, but — like the smell — it wasn't unpleasant, just different.

He injected her in the big muscle of the neck. Of all the places he could jab her, that was the most likely to do anything. Maybe it had enough proximity to diffuse out to her brain and give her some relief from whatever she was feeling. 

If she even _was_ in pain; he was only guessing about that. He had no idea what Suzie's dead animals were feeling. In a kind world, the same deadness that kept their hearts from beating and their lungs from breathing would also stop their nerves sending pain messages to their brains as their bodies decayed. Maybe it was only a general sense of wrongness, an awareness that their dead bodies weren't _right,_ that kept driving them to him, through whatever instinct told them that help could be found at Torchwood.

Yeah. Nice to have fantasies to see you through. As he'd said to the unicorn, it was a bloody awful, unfair world.

He rubbed the fur on her neck, hoping to spread the painkiller around, and ran his fingers through her tangled mane, trying not to notice how the hair dislodged from her decaying hide. "How's that feel, girl? Any better?"

She had held entirely still, just with those little quivers of her hide and flank, but now the dead muscles of her neck rippled under his hand and she turned her head slightly, her sunken eye rolling to look at him. Owen went very still. He was vaguely aware of a ripple of movement among the team. _Been nice knowing you guys, looking forward to Jack trying to find the right box on the official Torchwood forms for "veterinarian impaled by zombie unicorn, please dispatch a new one"_ ...

Then the unicorn sprang abruptly away from him. She was less graceful than normal for her kind, almost stumbling, but was still fast. The bushes swallowed her.

Owen took a deep breath. The mossy scent still lingered in his nostrils. He snapped the cap over the used needle and put it away by sheer habit, then turned to find the others were all staring at him. Gwen had the tranq gun raised, and Ianto and Tosh both looked like they were poised on the edge of a shift.

"What?" Owen said defensively.

"I knew the dead ones sometimes come to you for help," Tosh said, which surprised him; he hadn't realized anyone had noticed. "I've just never seen it." She took a breath, steadying herself. "Will that help her, do you think?"

For some reason the way Tosh was looking at him — soft and warm — made him angry; it only reminded him that he couldn't actually do anything to help, not really. "It's a bloody painkiller that her body can't even metabolize. The only thing that could help any of them is a quick, merciful death. Or Suzie not doing that to them in the first place." He started to brush his hands against the thighs of his jeans, as if he could brush away the touch of the unicorn's rotted hide so easily, and then reached for the hand sanitizer instead; no sense taking chances. "Let's go, if any of you are here to catch a basilisk and not just rubberneck."

* * *

Torchwood Sanctuary Three was several hundred acres encompassing what had formerly been a significant chunk of Cardiff before the Rift and all that had come from it — fae and dragons and wild, feral magic — got done with this place. These days it was off limits to normal humans aside from those few who worked there, and the repulsion field around the boundaries (only Jack knew the details) kept them out.

It was an eerie and uncanny place. The area around the Hub was comparatively tame, and the friendlier of the wildlife tended to hang out there, the ones who enjoyed human company and liked being petted and fed. But it got steadily wilder the farther out from there that you went. No one, except maybe Jack, really knew everything that was back here in the depths of the forest. Strange things, wild things. Fae and monsters from the oldest myth ... and dragons, of course.

They passed burn marks, high on the bole of a tree far too enormous to have grown to its present size in just the few years since the sanctuary was taken over by magic and abandoned by humans. First Gwen and then the others began casting glances in Ianto's direction.

"Don't look at me," Ianto said. "I'm only a half dragon, and a dragon _shifter_ at that. I have about as much ability to influence one of the wild dragons, the true elder dragons as ... as you lot have with fae just because you both happen to be bipeds of approximately the same shape. Less, perhaps, since at least the fae can speak human languages; they just don't like to. I only know a few phrases of Elder Dragon and most of them are variations on 'Please don't eat me, I don't taste good.'"

"When it comes down to it, that's all you really need to say, yeah?" Owen said.

Ianto made a faint, exasperated sound.

The only one of them who seemed to be really enjoying herself was Tosh. She flitted through the trees and around the abandoned buildings, sometimes as a human, sometimes as a fox with her three tails flying high behind her.

Tosh had been the first of them he'd met, and he still dreamed of it sometimes: the hospital's A&E after a siren masquerading as a drowning victim had torn through them. The walls painted with blood — his own throat raw from screaming, with Katie's blood still hot and wet on his hands — and in the middle of it all, a small woman in a purple jacket materializing out of thin air, her three tails visible for a moment before they too faded, like a rainbow afterimage.

He had asked her about the tails once, after he'd had a little while to adjust to the fact that this was really his life now, that there actually _was_ some kind of magical forest preserve in that condemned part of Cardiff that everyone always avoided, and apparently he now worked in it as a magical veterinarian. _Aren't there supposed to be nine tails?_ he'd asked, and Tosh had explained that the tails came with age and wisdom. She was barely a hundred yet.

She had never said how she came to be with Torchwood, but Owen had noticed how she avoided dark, enclosed spaces, and made herself scarce whenever liaisons from UNIT or even the other Torchwood branches were at the Hub, flickering away into a rainbow ghost and then invisibility. Ianto probably knew; if dragon hoards were an actual thing, then Ianto hoarded paperwork, and he spent enough time in the archives under the Hub that he certainly knew anything that was stored down there about anyone else he worked with. But Owen hadn't asked; it seemed like something he ought to wait for Tosh to talk about, if she wanted to.

The charred trail of acidic basilisk fluids led them deeper into the dark, eldritch part of the forest. They went under a half-broken-down highway overpass dripping with moss and vines. There were fewer intact buildings here, and more lumps of moss and brushy overgrowth, with melted, twisted steel beams jutting out, or glittering shards of broken window glass.

A dangling vine tried to constrict itself around Gwen's neck. As she jerked away with a gasp, Ianto caught it in his hand and gave it a firm shake before letting it go. It meekly coiled back up its tree.

"You are a useful person to have around for a trek through the deep woods," Gwen told him, rubbing her throat.

"It knows a bigger predator when it meets one. The problem is," Ianto said, looking around into the deep shadows under the trees and between the galleries of old, half-collapsed buildings, "there are much bigger predators than me out here."

Tosh flickered into visibility in a patch of sunlight between two vine-wrapped light poles. "Should we call Jack? We don't have to keep pursuing."

"We've still got a trail," Owen said, pointing at the scorched undergrowth in front of them.

He was starting to think they might not have a choice except to put the basilisk down. It was bleeding heavily, judging from all the scorched foliage. He couldn't do surgery on it; it would melt his tools, not to speak of his hands. The best they could do was cage it up (if they could find a cage that would hold it) and give it painkillers (if any would work on it) and let it get better on its own. And even if it did survive, Jack might decide that it needed to go into the Hub cages, reserved for the creatures that posed too much of a threat to roam free.

You couldn't save them all. He'd learned that lesson more thoroughly than he wished. But that didn't stop him from wanting to try.

"Stop," Ianto said abruptly, touching Gwen's arm. He pointed at a stone pillar, surrounded by trees and vine-covered lumps that might once have been cars. It was slightly taller than man-high, and marked with runes spiraling up its length. "Fae-marks. This is one of their territories. We need to go around."

Fortunately the basilisk's trail also bent around the pillar and off into the woods in a new direction. Rather than continuing to deepen and darken, the forest seemed to be lightening. They passed a recognizable petrol station, even if the pumps were buried in some kind of dark-leafed, petrol-eating kudzu.

"We're getting close to the boundary," Tosh said. "Do you think it's trying to get out?"

"It won't," Gwen said. "It can't."

But she sounded uncertain. Owen was, too. They hadn't had a basilisk before — at least not since he'd been here. So far it had melted its way out of every cage they had tried to put it in. He didn't _think_ it could get past Torchwood's barricades (part physical, part magical) but if it did get out into the city, it would leave a trail of death behind it. It had already killed three people before Jack had been able to bring it in.

They couldn't let it get out. If it came down to saving it or killing it, they had to save the most lives that they possibly could. 

There was sunlight up ahead, and abruptly they came out of the woods into the grassy area along the boundary. It was always deeply weird looking out from inside. From the outside, Owen knew, you could hardly even see it; part of how it worked was that it made you not want to look at it, or think about it. Most people in Cardiff hardly even knew the sanctuary was here, even though it had taken over a large part of the city.

But from the inside, it was like looking out from a zoo habitat into the normal world. On their side was a forest primeval, with vines and brambles crawling in dense mats over broken-down buildings and rubbish tips and broken-over power poles. Then there was the grassy verge, and a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence, and a vivid shimmer in the air, extending upward until it merged with the brilliance of the sky. You could see it better on a rainy day, arcing up to enclose the entire sanctuary, stopping anything from flying out as well as from tearing through the fence or digging out from beneath it.

But it didn't stop them from being able to see out, and on the far side, there was more grassy verge and a ditch and then a row of back garden fences. He could see clothing on lines and hanging trellises and dangling bird feeders. A small group of children were kicking a ball around behind the fences, risking with every kick that it would roll into the ditch. None of them glanced at the fence. For them, it hardly existed.

And, on this side, was the basilisk. It paced back and forth along the barrier, panting and hissing like a dying teakettle. 

"So now what," Gwen murmured, as they watched it pacing. Owen glanced at her to make sure her sunglasses were in place, and lightly touched his own, reassuring himself.

"First things first," he said quietly. "Bring it in." He nodded to her tranq gun.

Gwen shouldered the gun and unleashed a dart.

Her aim was true. The dart blossomed from the basilisk's shoulder. It spun around with shocking speed, hissing loudly, and the group at the edge of the woods retreated a few steps.

"And now it falls down, right?" Tosh asked, as the basilisk took a step toward them.

"Those are the ketamine?" Owen asked, and Gwen nodded. "Damn it, those things ought to be able to take down a bear."

"It doesn't seem to be working, Owen," Ianto said. 

"Thanks, Captain Obvious!"

The basilisk lurched another step, got its feet under it, and ran toward them.

They scattered, but the basilisk was shockingly fast, and unpredictable in its movements. Whirling with a splatter of acid blood that smoked off the grass, it snapped at the nearest person, who happened to be a rapidly retreating Tosh.

She was immune to its gaze, but not to the acid of its bodily fluids. Tosh cried out in pain as it bit one of her tails — invisible in her human form, but still present in reality. All three tails flickered into view as she stumbled away.

Gwen gave a cry of anger, and Owen grabbed a rock, with no idea what he was doing, just wanting to get its attention off Tosh. He flung the rock; it glanced off the basilisk's scaly flank, and it whipped around, wheezing and drooling bloody acid saliva.

"We're trying to _help_ you — sodding piece of —" He wanted to get to Tosh, who had collapsed against a tree, sobbing in pain. But the basilisk was in the way. His headache crashed down again when its baleful glare settled on him, so intense he swayed and had to steady himself against a tree.

"Careful, both of you," Ianto said, and then he shifted, the gleaming length of the red dragon uncoiling from his normal workaday human-looking guise.

It was always fascinating to watch Ianto do that; it was like he suddenly got _sharp_ , extending out like a blade in all directions. Owen, still reeling from the basilisk's stare, stumbled away from the tree and caught himself with a hand on Ianto's scaly side. Ianto, as a half dragon, couldn't breathe fire, but he was still surprisingly warm, as if a banked fire heated him from inside.

"I need to get to Tosh," Owen said breathlessly. "Can you get it away from her?"

Ianto lowered his head, the mobile row of spines behind his jaw flexing. "Count on it."

"Don't let it touch you!" Owen said, as Ianto stepped away from him, streamlining his wings down his back. "The stare won't do anything, but you saw what the acid did to Tosh. I don't need two of you in the same shape."

Tosh was collapsed among the tree roots, making tiny sobbing sounds of pain. Gwen jockeyed for a clear shot, snapping another dart into the tranq gun, but the damn things weren't doing anything anyway. Some creatures were unaffected by normal drugs, and it looked like the basilisk was one of those, its bodily acids burning away the drugs before they could do anything.

Ianto seemed to consider the situation for a moment, then sank his teeth into a sapling and used his powerful neck muscles to wrench it out of the ground. He wielded it awkwardly in front of him like a sort of jousting pole, sweeping the basilisk out of the way.

"Get Tosh!" he said through clenched teeth, pushing the basilisk further back, jockeying for position as it tried to get around him. "I'll keep it away from you."

As soon as there was a clear path, Owen and Gwen dashed in. Gwen slung the gun over her shoulder and knelt to put her arms around Tosh, holding her while Owen took a look at her injuries.

"Oh, sweetheart," Gwen murmured, hugging her. Tosh clung back, shuddering with pain. Her tails sprawled limply across the grass. Owen saw with horror how the basilisk's acid clung, eating its way through flesh and bone; he could glimpse the actual white-raw bones of her tail beneath the burned and ragged fur. No wonder she was in agony.

"It's all right, it's all right," he soothed her, planting a firm hand on her hip. "I need to wash it off — Gwen, you have a water bottle in that well-stocked backpack of yours?"

Gwen nodded, and slung the pack off one arm. Owen unscrewed the cap and washed water across Tosh's tail, trying to steel himself against her cries of pain. He clasped her arm, and she raised her hand and gripped his forearm with a hold that felt like it was leaving bruises.

"It's okay, it's okay. Just getting that shit off." He tried not to listen too closely to the sound of crashing in the bushes nearby, and once a pained, distant yelp from Ianto. "Gonna give you a shot now. Right in the tail. Probably that'll sound dirty when we tell the story later, won't it?"

"Owen," Tosh gasped out, not really in response to what he'd actually said so much as a soft hurt sound — reaching out for him, the way the hurt creatures in the forest seemed to. Gwen murmured in her ear and kissed her forehead, and Tosh turned her head and tilted her temple against Gwen's.

Owen grasped her tail to hold it still — aware, on some level, that he'd never touched it before; it was so _alive_ under his hand, fine flat muscles rippling against bone — and pressed the syringe of morphine into the base. Her tail flickered in and out of existence, and solidified again; he had a moment when he wasn't sure if the drug would have taken or if she'd lost it through the phasing in and out, but she was already relaxing, sagging back into Gwen's arms. Owen rested a hand on her arm, felt her relaxing slowly.

"Will a bandage stay on?" he asked her. "I'd like to get that covered, but no point if it's just gonna phase out as soon as you shift."

"You shouldn't need to." Tosh's eyes were half-closed, her breath coming in quick short gasps between words. "We heal fast, and we aren't prone to infection. Just ... leave it alone, it'll heal fine."

"If you say so, but I'm looking at it later, back at the Hub. Got her?" he asked Gwen, and she nodded. He opened his medical kit and sorted through it. "Come on, you better still be in here, don't tell me I don't stock it anymore ..."

"What are you looking for?" Gwen asked over the top of Tosh's head. She was stroking back Tosh's sweaty hair, soothing her.

"There's a drug cocktail Jack and I came up with when we had to take down that manticore last spring, the one in the shopping plaza? It's a similar situation to this, with toxic bodily fluids that burn through our drugs. C'mon, don't tell me that I didn't ... aha, _there_ you are."

"Do you think that'll do it?" Gwen asked as he opened up the tranq gun and snapped out one of the darts.

"Don't know," he murmured, distracted. There was no way he was going to be able to load enough of a dose into one of the darts. Great: he'd have to do this the old-fashioned way, and try to get close enough to stab it with a syringe. "You good here for a few minutes?"

"Owen?" Tosh asked, struggling weakly to get out of Gwen's grasp. "Be careful. We can help —"

"No, _you_ can stay right there. Doctor's orders." He straightened up and slung the case over his shoulder.

"Can you shift, love?" Gwen asked. "I can carry you in my jacket and we can back him up."

Tosh had to concentrate hard rather than her usual effortless flowing from one shape to another, but she dwindled into a small and shivering fox, cradled in Gwen's arms with her tails dangling limply.

"Oh no you don't," Owen said. He glanced around at another crash in the woods. "You need to take care of her."

Gwen carefully unzipped her jacket halfway down and tucked Tosh into the front of it. "There," she said, reaching for the tranq rifle.

"That thing doesn't even _do_ anything."

"So I've got this too," Gwen said, patting the gun at her hip. "Are we going to go help Ianto or just stand here arguing?" Tosh, with her bright-eyed head poking out of Gwen's jacket, looked about as stubborn as a fox could.

Owen cursed under his breath and gripped the syringe in a sweaty, nervous hand. "Fine, but stay _back,_ all right? Last thing I need is you two getting in between."

Funny thing, he thought. When he first came here, he'd considered this a step _down_ ; it was only that he had nowhere else to go. He hadn't gone through all those years of medical school to be a bloody veterinarian.

And now here he was, prepared to go after a fucking basilisk with a handheld syringe. Sod it all.

At least it wasn't hard to find Ianto and the basilisk; all they had to do was follow the crashing and snarling. Owen and Gwen burst out of the woods to find Ianto facing off against the basilisk in an overgrown clearing with some broken-down structures underneath heaps of thorny vines; it might be an old soccer pitch. One of Ianto's wings trailed along the ground, and Owen's stomach lurched when he took in its weirdly motheaten appearance. Ianto had gotten splattered with basilisk venom as well.

"What is the _matter_ with all of you?" he snapped, striding out from the edge of the woods. He held the syringe at his hip, low and half-hidden. "Do you lot _like_ getting poisoned or something? I don't want to have to explain to Jack that I let you get basilisk'd to death."

"Like you can _make_ me do anything," Ianto said, moving quickly to block the basilisk as it caught sight of Owen and tried to dive around him. God, that thing was fast. Ianto was tiring, as well as hurt; his scaly sides heaved as he panted.

"Yes yes, you're the size of a city bus and twice as stubborn — _move_ , you idiot, I need to get close to it before I can do anything."

"So I had this idea," Ianto panted. "I was thinking — there are a lot of old structures out here, and some of them have basements. If we could get it into one of those, like a pit trap, yeah? It's concrete all around. Even if it can burn its way out, it might take a while."

"It's got claws," Owen pointed out. "It can probably climb."

"If you have any better ideas ..."

"No," he admitted. "It might work." It would at least confine the basilisk, and make it easier to get close enough to inject it with the drugs. It might be possible to immobilize it, or rig up something so he could jab it with the syringe from a distance.

"This place looks like it used to be a school or park, doesn't it?" Gwen said from the edge of the woods. "Maybe there's a swimming pool."

Ianto perked up, looking less exhausted. "I could fly to scout around, but it means leaving you lot alone with it."

"I can scout," Tosh said from Gwen's jacket.

Owen gave her a sharp look. His headache was back, pulsing at his temples. "Don't go undoing all my work, now."

"I can do it." Tosh leaped from Gwen's arms, and nearly stumbled on hitting the ground — something Owen had never seen her do before, with her usual incredible grace — but was up again immediately, leaping in great bounds past the basilisk and away. Two tails floated high behind her, while the third almost dragged.

"Be careful!" Gwen yelled after her, saving Owen the bother of doing it himself.

Confronted by the three of them, the basilisk backed away, up against the side of an overgrown concrete wall. Gwen and Owen moved up to flank Ianto, and Owen glanced up at the dragon. Ianto's jagged teeth were clenched in his long scaly jaws.

"You need something for that wing?" Owen asked quietly.

"The wing's fine. What've you got in the syringe there?"

"Drugs I think might be able to knock it down for a little while. Long enough to ... I don't know, tie it up, or ..."

"Owen," Ianto murmured, with his gaze on the hissing, cornered basilisk, "we might not be able to bring this one in."

Gwen was the one who spoke up. "We have to try. Jack caught it once."

"Jack is ... Jack." Ianto shook his head. "All right, so let's hope Tosh can find somewhere we can trap it. Because otherwise, none of us can get close to it. Not safely."

"Everyone!" Tosh said, appearing with her usual suddenness on the wall above the basilisk. "I think I found something better than a swimming pool. There's an old cistern back here. It's deep and brick, and I don't think the basilisk can climb out if we can get it in. There's even a lid."

"We can try to get it in and then wait for Jack," Gwen said softly. "He's dealt with this sort of thing a lot longer than we have. He might have some ideas for how we can treat it and release it safely."

"Right," Owen muttered. He shook out the hand not holding the syringe. "You know those poncy little loops that dog-catchers have? We should invest in a few of those. Ianto, make a note."

"Noted," the dragon murmured.

"So we just ... herd it?" Gwen asked.

"You got a better idea, let's hear it," Owen said.

They spread out and began to close on the basilisk. It occurred to Owen that they were really only going to get one shot at this. If the basilisk got past them into the trees, there was almost no chance they could find it again. It would either live in the Torchwood sanctuary for months or years, posing a constant danger to anything not immune to its stare and venom, or it would die somewhere from its injuries, when they could have helped it. And that was assuming it didn't manage to melt its way through the barrier somehow, getting out into the city again to leave a trail of bodies behind it.

.... yeah. Failure wasn't an option here.

Ianto spread his wings to make himself look bigger and more intimidating, though Owen couldn't help noticing him grinding his teeth when the injured wing caught the air. Those ragged holes must burn like fire. Damned stubborn bastard. Well, he'd do something about it when the basilisk situation was dealt with, one way or another.

"Should we maybe ... I don't know, pluck a branch and wave it or something?" Gwen asked, low, as they cautiously spread their net wider, stalking through the grass.

"Whatever for?" Owen said.

"I don't know! We used to do that when I was a child trying to chase the neighbor's cat out of our yard."

"It's not a bloody cat, Gwen!"

"I know that! Twat," she muttered.

The basilisk hissed and made a short dash at them. Owen and Gwen scattered; Ianto spread his wings wider and charged forward, bluffing, and it backed up against the wall again.

"This is going nowhere," Owen said.

"We need to all get on one side," Gwen pointed out. "So it has only one way to go."

"Further cat-chasing wisdom from your childhood?"

"It's common _sense_ , you plonker. If we don't show it the way we want it to go, it'll just stay where it is."

"And if we open up an escape route, it'll scarper off into the forest and we'll never see it again."

"How about I block the escape route while leaving the way open to Tosh's cistern," Ianto suggested. "And you two can herd it towards me."

He retreated to the edge of the woods, wings spread wide (the injured one quivered a little), and lowered his head, crouching a bit, making himself not precisely intimidating so much as a bulwark that even the basilisk might think twice about risking. There was a clear corridor around the end of the wall, and Tosh, standing on top, pointed with a paw. This left Gwen and Owen to circle around behind the basilisk, trying to block the further remaining exit routes to the woods.

"You know, it reminds me a bit of you," Gwen murmured as they stalked it through the grass.

"Oh, thanks a lot."

"No, really. Small, aggressive, hissing at everyone —"

"You know, the next time you come to me for a rabies jab, don't think I won't go for the buttock shot."

"Because it's scared," Gwen said softly, looking ahead at the basilisk. "Because it thinks everyone who comes at it is going to hurt it, not help it — and that's all it's got so far, isn't it? People jabbing it with needles and shouting at it and trying to chase it into places. It's all right, sweetheart. We know you aren't really like that, you just don't know us yet. We only want to help you."

"You talking to me or it now?" Owen asked, in something that managed to almost approximate a normal voice, but didn't quite make it.

"Oh shush," she said, and smiled at him, a full gap-toothed smile, and then thrust out her tranq rifle with the butt forward at the basilisk, waving it like one of those branches she'd talked about.

The basilisk bolted — not at Ianto, and the clear path they'd opened up, but straight at them. _"Fuck!"_ they both yelled in tandem, each one diving to the side. Gwen hit hard, and her chin hit the ground; her sunglasses went flying. 

"My glasses," she gasped out, clapping a hand to her face.

"Don't open your eyes!" Owen shouted at her. The basilisk bore down on him, and then veered off to the side, into the wide-open gap between him and Gwen. It was going to get away — hell, he should just _let_ it, he didn't owe it or anyone else at the sanctuary a damn thing.

Instead, he reached out and grabbed its ankle.

He got it by the back leg. It nearly wrenched his arm out of the socket, and then the burning began. Even where it wasn't leaking venomous fluids, its scaly skin seeped toxic liquid. He gasped aloud at the agony — and held on, dogged, even as his eyes leaked tears of pain, and brought the other hand with the syringe forward, jabbing it grimly into the basilisk's flank.

It whipped around, snarling. Owen fell back, his hand on fire. His fingers loosed from its ankle, torn free or going slack; he could hardly tell anymore — the only sensation from that hand was scorching pain. His hip hit the ground hard, and then his back, and that was the first time he realized that the world was no longer as dim as it had been. Like Gwen, he'd lost his protective sunglasses in his fall. He just hadn't realized it, focused as he was on catching hold of the basilisk before it got away.

It caught his gaze with its own.

Its eyes were coals, burning his world away. It didn't really hurt. It was something beyond that, a cold clawing darkness reaching up to swallow him.

The last thing he heard, the last thing he ever heard, was someone screaming his name.

* * *

_"Owen!"_

Gwen heard Tosh scream, but she couldn't look. She didn't _dare_ look; instead she groped for her sunglasses, with her other hand clasped over her eyes.

"Oh thank God, thank God," she whispered, as her fingers closed around the hard edges. She fumbled the glasses onto her face and rolled over and sat up.

She was just in time to see the fox streak out of nowhere and slam into the basilisk.

Tosh screamed when she touched the basilisk's poisonous skin, but it was a scream born of rage as much as pain. She clawed it across the face, scrambling away and then whipping around. For a frozen instant, Tosh stood in front of the much bigger basilisk, between it and Owen's crumpled body. Her three tails — one sagging — flowed behind her as if in an unseen wind. 

Gwen didn't quite have time to finish drawing her gun before the basilisk backed down, backing away from whatever promise of violent retribution was promised in the tiny fox's aggressive, bristling posture.

Then Ianto thudded down behind it, snarling.

"Ianto!" Gwen shouted. "Get it to the cistern, if you can!"

"Bloody hell, _why,"_ Ianto roared. "Are we still trying to save the damn thing?"

"Yes, we bloody well are, because it's what we're here for! Because Owen —" Her voice cracked. "Owen _died_ for that!"

"To hell with this entire day," Ianto murmured. His wounded wings snapped out with a thundercrack, but he barely flinched as they hit the air. He launched himself skyward, and caught the basilisk in his claws, gasping in pain as its poisonous skin and blood sizzled on his skin. It twisted around and sank its teeth into his ankle. His entire body contorted in agony. "The cistern, Tosh, _where!_ "

"It's —" Tosh gave Gwen a wild, desperate look, as frantic and miserable as a fox could look.

"Go, go!" Gwen yelled at her. "I'll be with Owen. _Show_ him!"

Tosh gave Owen a last miserable, torn look and then bounded away in tremendous, long leaps, to the top of the wall in one jump and then out of sight beyond.

Gwen stumbled over and fell to her knees beside Owen. She was still hoping for some kind of miracle until she saw his face. His face was white and slack, his eyes open. She had never seen anyone so obviously dead in her life.

Still, she tilted back his head; she closed her mouth over his slack, cold lips. She was still doing CPR when Ianto thudded down next to her, and Tosh's light form landed next to her, and shifted back to human-shaped Tosh, who gasped out a quiet sound of distress and then began to cry.

* * *

At least they had a dragon to carry the body back with.

"Well, you lot have been out a long time," Jack said from the upper level when they came into the Hub, and then he fell silent when he got a look at all of them.

Gwen was helping Tosh carry Owen. Tosh shouldn't have been helping anyone carry anything, with her hands and her tail like they were, but Ianto was in worse shape. He had shifted human again, but was barely managing to stumble along behind; he kept trying to catch himself on things and then jerking away with a soft gasp as his poison-scored hands raked along the railings and walls. Gwen would have helped him, but she had to help Tosh instead. They could have left Owen until they got the hurt ones inside, but Tosh wouldn't leave him and she wouldn't leave Tosh.

 _"Fuck,"_ Jack said, heartfelt, and Gwen looked back and saw him descend to their level of the Hub in long bounds, taking three and four steps at a time. He wrapped an arm around Ianto, who gave a little sigh and wilted onto Jack's neck with a shudder, as if only now giving himself permission to let go. "What happened; what the fuck _happened?"_

"A basilisk happened," Tosh said. Her voice was thick with unshed tears.

They laid Owen on the table down in the autopsy bay. Gwen cupped a hand under his neck and eased his head back, and then realized that it didn't _matter,_ it wasn't like he could feel it anymore. 

Tosh was shivering and clearly only holding herself up with a grip on the edge of the exam table. Gwen put an arm around her and lowered her to the floor, got her sat down in something like a comfortable position, and looked up the stairs. Jack and Ianto were on the top step, Ianto turned with his face pressed against Jack's collarbone. She didn't want to interrupt them; God, how she wanted Rhys now, how she wanted a _hug._ But ....

"Jack, the basilisk is out by — damn it, I don't even know where it is, exactly. I can show you our approximate route on the map. It's trapped in an old cistern, but none of us are ..."

"In shape to do anything about it. I get it." Jack pressed a kiss to Ianto's forehead, and stood up. "Show me."

Gwen squeezed Tosh's shoulder and left her there, aching for her — for all of them. Jack ran a gentle hand down Ianto's neck and shoulder, and then went with her. 

"Here, she said, showing him on the monitor with the big, complex map of the sanctuary that Tosh added to every day. "It wouldn't be such a priority, but we have no idea if it's going to be able to get out, or what it might kill if it does. And it's ... it's hurt badly, Jack. It was scared of us. Defending itself." She wasn't sure why she felt such an urge to defend the creature, except that it felt wrong not to — as if it would have betrayed Owen to do anything else. "One of us has to go deal with it, and you ..."

"I'm far better suited. I know." He glanced back at the autopsy bay. "Take care of them."

"I will," Gwen said, but the words stuck, bitter, in her throat. Because she hadn't, had she?

One of them was dead.

She went back to the autopsy bay. They had two injured, and no doctor. She didn't know how to choose between them, but Ianto was probably the worst off, because at least Tosh had had some painkillers. Ianto looked gray, leaning against the cinderblock wall. Gwen glanced down at Tosh, sitting with her back against the exam table and her eyes closed. One of Owen's hands had flopped down off the exam table, and Tosh had taken hold of it, pressing it to her cheek. Gwen had to look away.

"Ianto?" she said, pressing her hand carefully to his shoulder. The basilisk venom had eaten holes in his suit, turning it to rags hanging down from blistered skin. She had never really understood how Ianto's clothes related to his dragon form, and she still didn't, but in the dangling rags of his suit, she could see echoes of the holes eaten away in his wings. "Ianto? It's Gwen. Let me help you."

"Jack," Ianto said faintly. He had been nothing but brave, nothing but strong in the field, bringing them back home. Only now, his facade was starting to collapse.

"He's gone to deal with the basilisk. Please come down here with me, and let me help you."

She urged him to the bottom of the steps, then realized she had no idea what to with him, with any— with either of them. Tosh was still clinging to Owen's hand. Gwen found some blankets and threw them down on the autopsy bay floor, got Ianto to sit on them, and put another around Tosh. She was terribly afraid the venom was still doing them harm. Owen had washed it off Tosh's tail, hadn't he? And Tosh had seemed to perk up after.

"I'm going to clean you off, yeah?"

The worst damage was to Ianto's hands and arms. He had held the basilisk in both hands, and it had bitten his wrist. There were visible puncture marks, the skin darkened and blistered around them. She just didn't know what to _do._ She peeled off his ragged suit jacket, pulled up his sleeves, and washed the ragged and blistered skin before disinfecting everything and wrapping his hands in clean bandages. Though he was in obvious pain, she didn't know what kinds of painkillers were suitable for dragons, and was afraid of hurting him worse by trying to experiment.

"Tosh, how are your hands, love?"

"They're fine," Tosh breathed out, but she let Gwen take her hands, one by one, and wash off the venom from her blistered palms before carefully covering them in clean dressings. 

"Owen's hand," Tosh whispered.

"Tosh ..." But she couldn't say it. Instead she leaned over the autopsy table, trying not to look at Owen's still, slack face. His left hand was scorched and blistered right down to the bone. It wasn't like it mattered anymore, but she washed off the venom carefully, and even caught herself smearing on some of the same antibiotic salve that she'd put on Ianto and Tosh before she realized there was really, truly no point.

"How is everyone down here?" Jack asked quietly from the top of the stairs, and she dropped Owen's dead hand guiltily, as if she'd been caught ... _hoping,_ maybe.

She stepped carefully around Tosh, who was holding Owen's unhurt hand again, cupped between her bandaged palms. Gwen ran her hand across Tosh's tousled midnight-dark hair. Jack came down the steps and sat down beside Ianto, who rested his head on Jack's shoulder.

"The basilisk?" Gwen asked. She sat down on the end of the pallet she'd made for Ianto, and after a moment, carefully leaned her shoulder against his. Ianto pressed back against her.

"Not a problem anymore," Jack said.

Gwen gave him a quick look.

"Sent to a place where it won't be a problem," Jack clarified. "Not dead. Back into the rift."

"How did you get it out of the hole?"

"With great care," Jack said. "And perhaps a death or two. Mine, not anyone else's." He looked pale, she couldn't help noticing. "How are all of you doing?"

Gwen looked over at Tosh, who had bowed her head over Owen's hand, tears welling in the limpid eyes that still held hints of a fox even when she was a woman. "How _should_ we be, Jack?"

Jack swallowed and leaned his head back against the wall, and she felt immediately guilty. After a moment, she leaned over Ianto, very carefully, and put her hand over Jack's. Then she stretched out her foot until it could rest against Tosh's.

They all sat like that for a few minutes, still and quiet and hurting.

Then Jack lifted his head and said quietly, "Oh, _hello._ "

Gwen looked up.

There was, standing at the top of the stairs leading down to the autopsy bay, a dead unicorn.

"How did she even get in here?" Ianto murmured next to Gwen's shoulder. His hair brushed her cheek as he raised his head.

"She's a unicorn," Jack said softly. "I think they can just do that."

The unicorn came down each step one at a time, very meticulously, as if she felt her way blind. And perhaps from her sunken eyes and the way she swung her head back and forth, that was exactly what she was doing.

But she came, all the same, as if drawn here. Step by step, down the stairs. Tosh bristled, the fox flashing in her eyes.

"She'd best not be coming _here,"_ she said, through clenched teeth showing small fangs.

"I don't think she's going to hurt anyone," Jack said, his voice barely above a whisper. Gwen felt Ianto grow tense against her arm. "I don't think she can."

The unicorn stopped at the bottom of the stairs. She stood swaying, her head rotating slowly. Gwen could see the dull flash of bone through the gaps in her sagging, dead hide.

Then she stepped forward, and her dead head swung toward Owen, who lay on the autopsy table as if on a bier.

Tosh scrambled to her feet, and Gwen found herself standing as well, and was aware of Ianto climbing to his feet next to her, and Jack standing up with his hand on the grip of his gun.

"She remembers him," Gwen said, and she hardly recognized her own voice. "In the forest ... he helped her. I think she's come back to ..."

But she stopped on the edge of completing the sentence, because what could the unicorn do after all? Unicorns could heal, but even a living unicorn, in the full flush of health, couldn't bring back the dead. All that this unicorn, or any number of unicorns, could do now was provide him an honor guard.

But the unicorn turned her head, and her dead, dull horn dipped toward Owen's colorless forehead. Tosh gave a little gasp, reached out one bandaged hand, hesitated, then placed it against the pale, rotted fur of the unicorn's face.

"Please," Tosh said faintly.

The unicorn rotated her head slowly, and her horn swung to hang in the air between Owen's dead body and Tosh's chest.

"Tosh," Ianto murmured. Gwen could tell that he was poised on the verge of a shift.

"Just ... please," Tosh said. "Please don't hurt him."

The unicorn dipped her head, a strange sort of acknowledgement, and swung her horn back to brush across Owen's chest, dragging up his pale throat, his pointed chin and slightly parted lips. 

Tosh gasped quietly. Ianto said, low, "Jack?"

"I think it's all right," Jack said, but he sounded unsure, more than Gwen had ever heard from him before.

Even knowing it was impossible, Gwen caught herself looking for a miracle: as if Owen's chest might rise, his mouth open in a gasp for air. 

He didn't, of course.

But the unicorn began to slowly crumble. She melted, her body folding inward, as if the true death that had been denied to her was now catching up with her. There was a strange beauty to it, like a time-lapse of a flower run backward, and her face was serene. In moments her unraveling was complete, and there was nothing on the floor of the autopsy bay except a pile of mossy bones, looking as if they had been dead for years.

And then Owen did move.

Tosh gave a little shriek. Gwen heard herself cry out, too, and she felt Ianto's arm flinch where it rested against hers.

"... what," Owen said, hoarsely and shakily. He rolled over and braced a hand against the gurney. It was the injured hand, venom-burned down to the bone, and Gwen gasped and started to reach out, but Jack moved before she could, putting a hand on Owen's back and supporting him.

Owen didn't even seem to notice that he was using his burned hand to push himself slowly up to a sitting position. Leaning against Jack, he looked up, and stared at them, staring back at him. Tosh was clasping her hands against her chest; Gwen had paused with her hand in midair; and Ianto was just staring.

"Do I even want to know?" Owen asked. His voice cracked. He lightly touched his forehead. "I feel ... weird."

"Define weird," Jack said. There was a forced lightness in his tone that Gwen had come to recognize; it was Jack being flippant where another person would be panicking.

"Just ... weird? I don't know!" There was a hint of snap underneath, less vulnerability, more Owen being Owen. "That's why I used the word 'weird', Jack."

"What's the last thing you remember?" Ianto asked. His voice was calm, because he was Ianto, but there was panic in his eyes. Tosh looked like she couldn't have said anything if she wanted to.

"Woods," Owen said promptly. "Basilisk. We were hunting it — wait —" His eyes opened wide; an entire constellation of shock, horror, panic passed over his face. "It ... I _thought_ it looked at me. Maybe it just ... glanced at me? Did I pass out? I don't remember getting back to the Hub."

Gwen had to swallow a couple of times before she could speak up. "It looked right at you, Owen."

"So — then what?" Owen snapped, reverting back to anger, his automatic defense in any situation that threw him out of his emotional depth. "I'm clearly _not_ dead, since I'm sitting _right here,_ on the ... autopsy table ..." He looked shocked for a moment, a flash of deep vulnerability, before he jerked away from Jack's supportive hand. "Tosh," he said, and Tosh jumped. "Need to look at your tail, girl — no comments from the peanut gallery now, I'm the only one who gets to make those — and I remember you had a bloody great hole in your wing, Ianto. If you two could just step over here —"

"Owen," Jack said, speaking up for the first time since Owen sat up on the autopsy table. There was a note of quiet command in his voice. "I don't think that's a good idea. Not yet."

"Why the hell _not?"_ Owen snapped, flinching, and Gwen could tell that he knew something was wrong. He was terrified. He just didn't know how to deal with it, and in all fairness, neither did she, or any of them.

Jack sat a hip on the edge of the autopsy table. "Owen, you died," he said, and smiled a little. "Speaking as an expert here, I think you know that."

"Yeah, so I'm talking and sitting up, and you don't usually get that with dead people, in my expert opinion as a _fucking doctor,_ " Owen shot back, pulling away from him. "So if you could just explain with _your_ medical expertise —"

"Your heart's not beating," Jack said.

Gwen felt Ianto's little jerk of surprise because he still had his shoulder against hers as the two of them stood behind the pathetic pile of bones on the floor. Tosh made a tiny, hurt sound.

"I was just touching you," Jack went on, "and I couldn't feel anything. And you've only breathed in this entire time when you needed to speak. Owen, you're a man of science. Test yourself. But you already know it's not beating, don't you?"

"I ... _will_ run tests," Owen said hoarsely, "because basilisk exposure can't be good for people —" He swung his legs off the autopsy table and his feet hit the heap of bones on the floor, scattering them. Gwen jumped back with a cry, Ianto and Tosh jerked away, and Owen yelped, "What the fuck is _that?"_

"It's a unicorn," Gwen said. "The ... the dead one, from the forest. She came in here and touched you with her horn."

"And, so what?" Owen demanded. He was all the way down at the end of the autopsy table now, sitting on the edge — pulling away from Jack, away from them, drawing into himself in a terrified ball of defensive prickle. "So it, it — what are you saying? Can someone just actually fucking _tell me what happened?"_

"They brought you in dead," Jack said. He reached out a hand; Owen jerked away and nearly fell off the end of the table. "The unicorn came in here and touched you with its horn, and you came back. Er, sort of. And then it died."

There was a brief silence. Then Owen said, "It can't die, it's not alive. And from what you're saying, neither am I."

This broke Tosh out of her paralysis. "Owen," she said quietly, helplessly.

"I am fucking _not,_ that's what you're all saying — isn't it?" Owen's eyes were bright with a mix of fear and anger. "I'm one of Suzie's fucking _things_ now, am I?"

"Owen, calm down," Jack said. "Whatever you are, you aren't hers."

"Yeah? So what are you saying then? Tosh." Owen turned to look directly at her. "You'll give it to me straight, won't you, love? Do I feel different to you? The way Suzie's creatures do."

Tosh swallowed hard. Her eyes glittered with tears. She didn't answer. But Owen looked like he'd been struck.

"Right then," he snapped.

He slid off the end of the autopsy table, flinched with a look of utter dismay when his feet struck the bones on the floor, and then stepped over them and was half-running by the time he hit the stairs.

"Owen!" Tosh called after him. She covered her face with her hands. Gwen started to put a hand on her shoulder, but Tosh shrugged it off.

"Should someone go after him?" Ianto asked quietly, looking up the stairs. The question was directed mainly to Jack.

"Someone should at the very least make sure he doesn't destroy any expensive computer equipment." Jack hopped off the end of the autopsy table, briefly squeezed Ianto's uninjured shoulder — a light press of his hand — and then went up the stairs after Owen.

For a moment, no one moved. Then Gwen knelt and began gathering the unicorn's bones, just to give herself something to do with her hands. She was reluctant to touch them at first, but they felt just as they looked: if they had been abandoned for months, slick with moss and with no particular smell except for a faint, earthy scent. They weren't disgusting; they were merely sad.

Tosh sat down on the bottom step as if she'd wilted, and Ianto, after another moment of simply staring up the stairs, knelt down and began helping Gwen gather up the unicorn's bones with his bandaged hands.

There were a lot of bones in a creature the size of a horse. Gwen got two of Owen's large, rugged rubber tubs, normally used for collecting specimens, and they placed the bones in those.

Briefly, they heard voices from the level above — Jack calm, Owen snapping back — and then all was quiet. Tosh got up after a little while and shifted to a fox. She scampered up the stairs, going invisible halfway up.

"We got through Suzie," Ianto said quietly. His head was down, his voice calm, as he carefully picked up small bones and even bits of moss with bandaged fingertips, putting them into the bins. "We got through ... through Lisa. We'll get through this."

Gwen picked up the unicorn's horn, very carefully. It had come detached from the unicorn's skull when the bones had fallen, and both she and Ianto had left it alone until it was clear that they couldn't finish without touching it. She thought she ought to feel something, as if the miracles that attached to it could bleed through into her hands. But they didn't. It was only a piece of bone, no more or less.

"Gwen?" Ianto said softly, and she took a breath and laid the horn on top of the rest.

They carried the bins of unicorn bones up to the main level. There was no sign of anyone now: Owen, Jack, or Tosh.

"Great," Gwen said. "We've been abandoned."

Ianto gave her a wan smile.

"How's your arm?"

"Fine," he said, which meant it probably wasn't, and took her bin from her. "I'll get these sorted and put away."

"You don't have to —"

"Got nowhere to be," he said, and lifted the stack of bins. It was sometimes easy to forget, when Ianto was human-shaped, that he was actually several times stronger than a normal human, apparently even when he was hurt.

Gwen was left standing in the middle of the empty Hub. 

"Well," she said into the silence, "this day has been complete _balls."_

In the hush, she could hear Ianto clattering around down in the archives ... and something else. It sounded like soft crying.

She followed the sound quietly, up the stairs to one of the balconies. Eventually she found where the soft, miserable sound was coming from. It was Tosh, out of reach, a curled ball of fox fur among the rafters.

"Tosh?" Gwen called up to her. "Tosh, are you okay? Can you come down, love?"

The small ball of red fur slowly uncurled, and Tosh jumped down, landing lightly on Gwen's shoulder. Gwen took the fox into her arms. As always, Tosh was shockingly soft and light, like she was made of feathers. And Gwen had never seen a fox look so sad. Tosh curled up in Gwen's arms and tucked her nose under two of her tails.

"It's going to be okay. You know how Owen is, Tosh. He gets upset about things and then gets over it —"

"No, it's _not_ okay," Tosh said, with a small sniffle. "He doesn't smell right, Gwen, and I can't hear any heartbeat, and ... I don't know what he is now. He's like Suzie's other experiments. Wrong. _And he knows it."_

"He's not Suzie's," Gwen said. That, at least, she was sure of. "The energy, or whatever it was, that brought him back might have come from Suzie originally, but whatever he is now ... it's _different,_ Tosh. You saw him. He was like normal Owen, talking and complaining. Not like Suzie's sad, dead creatures."

She lifted Tosh up to her shoulder, and the fox slowly uncurled, raising her head.

"Do you know where they went?" Gwen asked.

Tosh shook her head. "Owen left, and Jack's gone after him. I ..." She hesitated. "I don't know what to do now, Gwen."

"I don't think any of us do." She ran a hand down the fox's smooth, soft back, from her ears to her tails—

"Tosh, do you have an extra tail?"

"Do I have a what?" Tosh leaped to her feet, balancing lightly on Gwen's shoulder.

"You do. There are four."

Tosh nearly spun around, trying to see her back end. "You're right," she said in a wondering voice when the dancing movement slowed.

"You told me once that you gain tails as you grow in wisdom, didn't you?"

"But I don't have any wisdom," Tosh complained, standing up with her forepaws on top of Gwen's head, her tails tickling Gwen's neck. "This is ... this is just _grief._ It's terrible and it's sad and I don't want it."

Gwen had no idea what to say to that — and then, suddenly, she did. "Show your new tails to Owen. He'll be interested, don't you think? He really wants to know how it all works, the animals in the sanctuary and all of it."

Tosh drooped. "I don't think he'll want to see me."

"Of course he will. I think he needs us now," Gwen said, "more than he ever has."

* * *

Owen was sitting halfway up a tree, one leg dangling.

He had never been a tree-climber before coming here. He was a city boy down to the bone. Climbing over fences to get into places he shouldn't be in — yeah, sure. Trees, on the other hand, were untrustworthy. Chaotic. 

You knew where you stood, with a fence.

But now here he was, in a place where nature was visibly and actively swallowing the trappings of the human world, fences and roads and buildings dissolving back into primordial wilderness. Since Jack had brought him here two years ago, he had spent more time than he really wanted to think about having to interact with nature up close: scrambling up and down ravines, struggling through brush, fending off man-eating vines ... and climbing trees.

He was actually pretty good at it by now. He had managed to get all the way up to where the branches of this massive, sprawling not-exactly-an-oak started to get thinner and less trustworthy.

From up here, he could see across the tops of smaller trees to the overgrown expanse of wild field that had once been Roald Dahl Plass. Most of the former quayside buildings were humped masses of vines, and the barrier glittered between them and the water.

Late afternoon sunshine slanted through the branches above him. Around him, the woods were quiet in a way he would never have noticed two years ago, let alone understood what it meant.

It meant the small creatures of the forest were afraid of him. They had gone quiet or fled, the way they did when Suzie's eldritch creations came around.

Which was what he was, now. Dead. But not gone. Hanging in some in-between state. Even the animals could tell how wrong he was.

He prodded at the raw, rubbery flesh of his burned hand. He couldn't stop poking at it, fascinated and repelled in equal measure by the visible flashes of bone, and the eerie lack of feeling when he touched it — like it wasn't part of him at all. If infection was still a problem in his current state, he probably ought to wrap it back up.

But he didn't know that. He didn't know anything about this. He was a scientist at heart; he wanted to _understand,_ but there was nothing to understand about this — it was magic, wrong and twisted magic, and he hadn't been this terrified since he had first had the mask ripped off the sane, ordinary world two years ago.

He kept touching his chest, his neck, trying to find a pulse. As if the next time he tried, there would be life and breath in him, and everything would make sense again.

He had been dealing with Suzie's creations for two years, but he still didn't know much about how they worked. No one at Torchwood did, not since Suzie had died. No one knew what energy animated them, what made some of them crumble weeks after their mistress's death while others had turned into zombie nightmares like the unicorn, and still others were all but intact even after all this time ...

He turned his hand over and realized it was shaking. Was that what was ahead for him, slow decay and a desperate search for relief and peace, when even death was closed to him ...?

"Owen," Jack's voice said from the bottom of the tree. He sounded out of breath, and annoyed. "Don't make me climb up there."

Owen thought about staying still and quiet, but Jack had clearly seen him up here; there was no point in hiding. He leaned out far enough to look down at Jack standing with hands on hips and the coat flaring around him. There were leaves in Jack's hair.

"I'm not coming down," Owen called. Jack shed his coat on the grass. "Oh, bollocks, are you really doing this?" 

Apparently he was. Owen derived some small satisfaction from the fact that Jack, who did almost everything well (or at least put on a good show of it) was not actually that good at climbing trees, especially wearing dress shoes. Owen's trainers and jeans were far more practical for it.

Eventually, huffing, Jack plunked down on a slightly larger limb just below Owen's.

"Happy?" Owen said.

"Nice view from up here."

"Yeah, that's why I'm here, the view. Not for solitude or anything," Owen said pointedly.

"I know what it is," Jack said quietly, "to die and come back."

The gentleness only made him angrier. "Yeah? Do you know anything about dying and coming back as a fucking zombie? Because that's where I am, and it's not much fun."

Jack looked up at him through the leafy branches. "I know that I'd rather have you alive than dead."

Owen grabbed a handful of leaves, wrenched them off their branch and balled them up in his fist, and flung the sticky wad as hard as he could.

"I'm not _alive_ , Jack. You've seen those miserable dead sods wandering around the woods, vacant-eyed and lost, haven't you? I'm one of _those_ now."

"Tell you the truth, you don't seem much different from before, really."

"Who knows what I'll be like in a week, or a month, though? What were _they_ like in the beginning?" His voice cracked. The fear was starting to surface, seeping through the breaks in his anger. "Did they _know_ what they used to be? Will I? How much of me is going to be left, when —"

Something swift darted through the leaves, a flash of red, a flurry of tails. Tosh came darting lightly out of the branches, leaped onto his shoulder, and wound around his neck like a furry scarf.

"Tosh, don't," Owen said, trying to fend her off without hurting her. "Not now."

Tosh nestled close and buried her pointed fox nose in his neck. She'd done this before sometimes, when she was scared or sad, so he knew what she normally felt like — the quivering length of soft fur, the tickle of her claws, the wet cold pinprick of her small pointed nose. He could still feel her, but the sensations were muffled, like the skin of his neck was numb. He tried to peel her off. She clung tenaciously.

"Tosh — stop it — we're going to fall out of this bloody tree."

"I'll catch you," Jack said from below, and started humming "It's Raining Men."

"Correction, we'll fall on Jack, and then we'll all fall to the bottom of this tree, and do you really want to find out what happens if I break both legs in my current state? Because I think I know the answer and it's not good."

"Owen, I'm sorry," Tosh said, and nestled closer to him. He could feel her breathing, and the quick patter of her heartbeat.

Genuine surprise catapulted him out of at least some of his anger and misery. "What are _you_ sorry about?"

"I'm sorry for earlier. Gwen talked to me—"

"Oh, of course she did—"

"—and I was _wrong,_ Owen." She sniffed at his neck. It almost tickled; the sensation wasn't as clear as before, but he could feel it. "You are different, it's true, but you _aren't_ like the other creatures in the woods."

"So what am I, then?" He was almost too curious to be offended. Almost.

"I don't know," Tosh said. She bumped his ear with her nose. "It's different, a little strange. But it doesn't hurt, being around you, like it does with them. I should have noticed that earlier. I'm sorry that I didn't."

He didn't know what to say to that, and then he didn't get a chance to, because there was a thump that shook the tree. It came from above them.

"So this is where you all are," Ianto said. Dragon-shaped, he was clinging to the top of the tree with his wings partly spread to help take his weight. Even so, the top of the tree swayed wildly.

"Do kindly fuck off, Ianto!" Owen yelped, clinging to the trunk to avoid falling. Tosh dug in her little claws; he felt the dull pinpricks against his neck.

"Are we all up a tree now?" Gwen asked from the bottom of the tree. "Christ, I paid ninety quid for these leggings, I'm not climbing a tree in 'em."

Jack laughed.

" _God,"_ Owen said, thunking his forehead against the tree. "I see, I missed the memo that the next team meeting was up _my damn tree,_ did I? Why are you all _here?"_

"Because we're worried about you, you towering clod!" Gwen called up the treetrunk.

God.

And yet they were all _here_ , weren't they? He still couldn't quite fathom it.

"Come down, Owen," Jack said. He stood up carefully, balancing on his branch. "Come on back to the Hub, we'll run some tests and figure this out."

"No one could figure it out for any of Suzie's other _things,"_ Owen said between his teeth.

"But you're not like them," Tosh said into his ear. "I keep telling you."

"Yeah? What's different _exactly,_ Tosh?"

"You've got us," she said, and pressed her nose into his ear.

"Want a ride down?" Ianto asked from above.

"No," Owen snapped, but he found himself gripped in the dragon's claws anyway. It was a brief, panic-inducing roller-coaster ride to the ground. Ianto let go when Owen's feet touched down; he stumbled and turned around to glare as Ianto shifted back. Jack was climbing down out of the tree on his own.

"Never do that again," Owen snapped. He took a breath and rested a hand on the nearest treetrunk. Tosh was still on his shoulder, sitting up now, and that reminded him: some of them had been hurt.

Jack dropped lightly off the bottom branch to the grass and picked up his coat. "You ready to come back to the Hub now?"

"Only if you'll let me do my job," Owen said. He pulled himself together, aware of Tosh perched on his shoulder — not pulling away anymore, a warm light weight resting on small, sure paws. "Look, at least let me take a look at this lot and make sure there are no lingering effects from the basilisk venom. What happened to me isn't contagious. I can still help people. And animals. Let me do that, Jack."

"He's not wrong," Ianto said — to Owen's surprise; Ianto arguing against Jack was very rare. "It's not like doctors with an expertise in care of magical creatures are easy to get hold of on short notice."

"Yeah, see? Dragon-boy agrees with me — and what are you doing flying on that wing? I can see how you're holding your arm. You'll dislocate your shoulder putting weight on it when it's like that."

"I changed my mind," Ianto said to Jack. "Let's put him back in the tree."

"Tosh," Gwen said, "you haven't shown Owen your tail yet, have you?"

"What about her tail?" Sudden alarm caught him. "Is it worse?"

"No, not the hurt one." Tosh leaped lightly down from his shoulder, and flinched a little when she hit the grass; he hadn't noticed when she was on his shoulder that her front paws were bandaged. "Look, Owen, I have more tails now."

"Huh." Fascinated despite himself, he crouched down. "How does that work? Did it just show up? Does it feel different?"

"I didn't even notice until Gwen told me." She twisted around, her tails fluttering gently behind her, trying to look at it.

Owen held out an arm and Tosh leaped onto it. It was the one with the injured hand; she nosed at it sadly.

"Doesn't hurt," Owen said, suddenly self-conscious. He pulled his hand back to his chest, while Tosh climbed up to his shoulder, and rewound the bandage around it. Tucking in the ends, he looked up at Jack, challenging. "So you gonna let me stay on the team?"

"Of course he's staying on the team," Gwen said, shocked.

"Provisionally," Jack said. "We're running tests when we get back to the Hub."

"Of course we're running bloody tests; _I_ want to run bloody tests. But first I'm doing a proper bandaging job on your bloody boyfriend."

"Oi," Gwen protested. "I was doing my best."

"It's not as if we don't have a variety of types on the team already," Tosh pointed out. She sat up primly on Owen's shoulder, tails hanging down his back; he could feel the slight tickle on the back of his neck when one of them brushed his skin, slightly dulled but definitely there.

"What did you call us earlier?" Ianto said. "Freaks?" His tone was amused, not upset.

"Yes, irony returning to bite me, consider me properly chastised," Owen muttered, and flipped two fingers at him.

But he felt strangely ... not _better_ exactly, because this was all still terrifying and weird as hell — but reassured, somehow. Jack had never objected to having people on the team with questionable abilities and even more questionable loyalties. And he still had a job to do here. There were patients he could help, human and nonhuman alike. 

"Yeah," he said, and adjusted Tosh carefully so she was riding more comfortably on his shoulder. "Let's go home."


End file.
